Rock week, and after some seriously rocky performances (haha!) on an – apparently – rocky stage, and after being coached by the inimitable rock legend Slash, reality bites. While all four of the remaining contestants will be going home this week, for three of them it’s a journey to a high-publicity madcap civic reception as an Idol semi-finalist, while for one it’s… just going home.

Rock music is supposed to rock your world but what’s not usually on the agenda is having the stage fall apart as happened immediately before the Idols were due to start their dress rehearsal for this week’s show. Being showered with glass is never a good look, so the rehearsals were skipped while the glass was swept up, and we were straight into the live show cold.

You’d never have known the difference, really.

Adam Lambert opened the show with Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love. A lot was made in the comments afterwards, and during the results show, about what a surprise it had been to “get” this song. No Zeppelin track has ever been performed on Idol and the clear implication – although this was never stated explicity – was that Zeppelin had given their permission to use the song only because Lambert is so damned good.

Allison Iraheta, who turned 17 last week, sang Janis Joplin’s Cry Baby. Paula Abdul commented that “if they ever do a biopic on Janis Joplin she’s got the role” while Cowell observed “the difference now from eight weeks ago is staggering.”

Next up was a duet by Kris Allen and Danny Gokey singing Styx’s Renegade. They did OK with it I guess, but neither of them looked really comfortable with the rock genre. And then it was Kris Allen‘s turn to sing solo, with Come Together by The Beatles. The judges all gave pretty subdued comments about his performance, but coming after three really rocky numbers, this song was never going to sound loud or raucous or upbeat. I thought their comments were a little unfair – he did OK with it.

Danny Gokey brought up the rear as far as solo performances went with Dream On by Aerosmith. For me this was easily the weakest of the night. He ended the song with the weirdest high-pitched scream which left Cowell saying “That scream at the end? It was like watching a horror film.” But “dead wife guy” – as he has been known on the forums throughout this year’s Idol – has built up a substantial fan base and was really never in danger even after his “horror film” rendition.

In the final duet Allison and Adam sang Slow Ride by Foghat. I’m not familiar with the song, but it sounded pretty cool to me. Cowell even thought it might have been enough to keep her in the contest.

Sadly, it wasn’t. Having spent much of the previous weeks in the bottom three, Allison was odds-on favourite to leave this week on a purely statistical basis and even though, for my money, she outsung Danny Gokey by a country mile (or maybe that should be a “rock mile”) she still didn’t pick up enough of the 60-odd million votes cast this week.

For a woman with a bad back, Paula Abdul can certainly still throw herself around a stage pretty well – or BE thrown around for that matter – although I notice the stage lights were dimmed almost to the point of blackness so that we couldn’t see how badly she was miming to her new single. Good to see Chris Daughtry back on the Idol stage though – which reminds me… I must pop over to Amazon and add one more to the international four MILLION copies his first album has sold. That should give Allison some comfort – getting kicked off Idol in the latter stages of the competition is no barrier to future success.

Next week: Semi-final week!